Conference & Bio

Challenge

Over the years, I have given the same proposal advice to many folks, through reviewing proposals for Chicago Camps and other conferences, and coaching speakers. I even co-authored a book, "Speaker Camp: A Self-Paced Workshop for Planning, Pitching, Preparing, and Presenting at Conferences" and "Conference Proposals That Don't Suck" for A List Apart about a lot of this advice. Given that context, it was easy to see how this could be a system, an application even, so I put my experience to good use and created what you're seeing here.

Build

It begins with the essentials you would gather anyway: the conference, the topic, who is in the room, a word limit, and a tone, along with whatever rough notes you have already jotted down. From there it drafts a full conference proposal that leans on the same sources I would reach for myself, the Speaker Camp guidance, the A List Apart article, and the proposal guides we use at Chicago Camps. You can ask for another version in plain language, something like tighten the opening or make the takeaways more concrete, and it keeps working until the proposal is one you would feel good about submitting.

Outcome

A proposal is really just the start of the work, so the tool keeps going from there into the rest of a speaker's kit. It can turn that proposal into a slide-by-slide presentation outline, complete with timing, speaker-notes hints, and a set of questions to expect during the Q&A. It can expand the same material into a draft article for a publication or a blog. And it will write a speaker bio at whatever length a given form asks for, whether that is 500, 350, 250, or 100 words, so the same voice carries all the way from the pitch through to the program.

In the end, it is the kind of proposal coaching I have offered for years, from the pitch through to the talk, ready the moment you have a topic worth sharing. Both halves of it run live for the community at Chicago Camps, as the Proposal Counselor and the Bio Counselor.